Synchronised Parking

To the 'Synchronised Parking Indicators' sculpture website	"Synchronised Parking"	to seanhillen.com to katharinelamb.com
This is a temporary site and will be improved and extended.	click here or on the thumbnails to see the parking gallery	Seán Hillen
		Seán Hillen

The concept: That cars sometimes get parked in interesting and apparently non-random patterns, connected to the phenomenon of synchronicity.	Based on the ‘Seriality’ theories of Paul Kammerer, and Carl Jung’s ideas about ‘Synchronicity’, popularised by Arthur Koestler’s 1971 book “The Roots of Coincidence”	It seemed to be demonstrable by documenting the phenomenon and over a couple of years Seán photographed many such patterns.

*For instance:*

1. Identical cars seem to 'get' parked together; the same colour and model nose-to-nose or across the road from each other.
2. Certain colours (red, black, white) appear in and in various patterns and almost musical rhythms; e.g. red, white, red, white or: red, white, black, white, red.
3. Clusters: a whole street of red or red and white cars sometimes happens.
4. After a while Sean noticed yellow and white cars often paired, and then that there was also or instead often a green car nearby, making up an Irish Tricolour, the national flag. Since this seemed an unlikely and amusing example of the phenomenon Sean has been photographing it lately and a larger tricolour parking gallery will be posted soon.

This may be ‘the music of what happens’ or may be just that we are such sheep and do this kind of thing unconsciously. Other potential 'explanations' are that reality is simply complicated enough for this to happen, and that humans are in fact very poor at predicting events. Interesting approaches also seem possible through 'complexity theory'.

Seán and Katharine Lamb are collaboratively executing a sculpture as an embodiment of this concept.

The idea is that the lamps indicate where cars might park. It remains to be seen if the mathematically-generated random number tables that the controllers will use will show interesting patterns.

More on Synchronicity & Seriality:

Most people have experienced so-called ‘synchronistic’ events; unusual co-incidences which have no sensible cause but have for them apparent significance of some kind.

‘Serial’ events on the other hand tend to have little special significance in themselves but seem to demonstrate paradoxical order in apparent randomness.

It may be that the patterns are there to be seen or that humans have such an urge to impose pattern and order that we see it anyway.

Paul Kammerer (see below) was a biologist who became interested in ‘synchronous’ events and applied the statistical analysis he’d learned from behaviouristic biology.

In one early experiment, sitting on a park bench he recorded the colours worn by people passing. Analysing the data gleaned showed clusters and patterns of, in this instance, unusual colours.

This phenomenon is said to be known by insurance actuaries, who work out the probabilities for insurance companies, and by gamblers who believe that ‘luck’ comes in ‘runs’ and that probability theory is an incomplete description of events.

Paul Kammerer and his “Law of Seriality”:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer advanced his little-known but thought-provoking theory of "seriality."

Kammerer supposed that events, objects, or occurrences of a like kind assemble together in space and time through unknown and acausal means.

Kammerer defined seriality as:
"a lawful recurrence, or clustering, in time and space whereby individual members of the sequence-as far as can be ascertained by careful analysis-are not connected by the same active source."

Where Jung's synchronicity deals with the relationship between subjectivity and the external world, Kammerer's seriality is more concerned with patterns and groupings of objects that occur in the environment.

Many of us have had the experience whereby we encounter a new word for the first time and, surprisingly, we encounter it numerous times after its initial introduction into our lives. For instance, someone rolls off a particularly mellifluous sounding word in conversation, "insouciant," that piques your curiosity but you have no idea of its meaning. Shortly after hearing it the first time, you read it in a book, someone else uses it in conversation-and someone else. This clustering of the word "insouciant" is an example of Kammerer's notion of seriality, and for Kammerer, much to his critic's disagreement, this patterning was not random but meaningful.

Link to another page on seriality and synchronicity